Stuff me in a tutu and let's screen experimental videos all day.

I am a writer who is definitely working with a specific language and more than English, that language is American. And I work very much in idiom and am very interested in the play of different kinds of rhetoric, whether it is the more high-flown stuff that reeks of age. I love to juxtapose something like that with something more current or urgent. I am always interested not in America by itself, but America as an idea and how that idea has changed over time, in the eyes of the rest of the world and in the eyes of Americans.

Everything's weird if you stare at it.

I felt as though I were snorting cocaine, or rappelling down a cliffside, or cliffsurfing off a cliff of pure cocaine.

When a translator translates my book, it is no longer just my book. It is the translator's book, too. So the book in another language is almost the work of two people. And that is quite interesting to me.

The place resembled a new model prison, or one that had achieved a provisional utopia after principled revolt, or maybe a homeless shelter for people with liberal arts degrees. The cages brought to mind those labs with their death-fuming vents near my college studio. These kids were part of some great experiment. It was maybe the same one in which I'd once been a subject. Unlike me, though, or the guinea pigs and hares, they were happy, or seemed happy, or were blogging about how they seemed happy.

This country was built on the backs of dudes who drank on buses. What we do honors them.